Without mentioning the White Tiger there is no way I can get away with a week of posts on Hybrid and Mutant Animals. The White Tiger is the most famous of all animal mutations since this does occur occasionally in the wild without human intervention. I’ve seen a couple at the Bannerghatta National Park in Bangalore too. That was one rare and awesome sight I will never forget.

Source – My flickr page

White Tiger (Panthera tigris) is a tiger with a genetic condition that nearly eliminates pigment in the normally orange fur although they still have dark stripes. This occurs when a tiger inherits two copies of the recessive gene for the paler coloration: pink nose, pink paws, grey-mottled skin, ice-blue eyes, and white to cream-coloured fur with black, grey, or chocolate-coloured stripes.

Dark-striped white individuals are well-documented in the Bengal Tiger subspecies (Panthera tigris tigris or P. t. bengalensis), may also have occurred in captive Siberian Tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), and may have been reported historically in several other subspecies. White pelage is most closely associated with the Bengal, or Indian subspecies. Currently, several hundred white tigers are in captivity worldwide with about 100 of them in India, and their numbers are on the increase.

An additional genetic condition can remove most of the striping of a white tiger, making the animal almost pure white.

Pure white tigers are also called snow tigers, ghost tigers (because their stripes show up in certain light) or recessive stripe tigers. Because the wide-band gene has a variable effect, many stripeless tigers have a degree of ghost striping.

White tigers have been recorded outside of the Indian state of Rewa and as far afield as China and Korea and from Nepal, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. The surprise occurrence of white tigers in American Zoos suggests that several orange Bengal tigers imported from India may have carried the recessive white gene (Bengal tigress Susie from an unidentified West coast zoo may have introduced the white gene into Amur/Siberian crosses).

Read more at Wikipedia ,Messy Beast 1 and Messy Beast 2.